On Being the Filling and Refilling that Well!

When I used to grouse about how life interfered with my writing schedule,  my friend, Richard Harnett,  always brushed it away saying "You're refilling your writer's well, Kel."

It always made me feel good to hear that. To think those times I was so busy with living I couldn't write would one day, serve my writing.

My well is filling, brimming, overflowing . . .  It's been keeping me from posting here--sorry for that. But this is life: rich, messy, exciting, unpredictable, scary--definitely a piled high, deli sandwich.

To paraphrase  Auntie Mame, "If life is a banquet I'm stuffing myself." (Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman.)

Mom's  the bottom layer.  Hers is a stodgy, crusty, nutty and grainy end of the loaf slice, anchoring our open-faced sandwich.

Mom has been in and out of rehab and hospital the past few years. Heavy as it may be, it's a spicy, interesting layer as it has brought me closer to my brother Joe and his family as we band together to support mom.

Curtis and my move from Indonesia to Trinidad and New York last year, brought with it a whole new bag of flavors we're sampling. It's predictable and surprising as dried seaweed sprinkes.

Son Max's wedding to Michelle in Long Island last summer, added a flavorful, thick ham and sweet, spicy saucy layer.

Daughter, Lexi's wedding to Ryan, scheduled for this November in Turks and Caicos, is proving pesto--fresh & complex with zing!

My new, long awaited picture book, Vampire Baby--the gumbo, sambal, curry layer adds fuel.

And soon to come--and feeling real courtesy of these 3D photos--our newest layer: a grandbaby! Max and Michelle's baby--a festive topper--arrives this August!

Yep, that well is brimming! And that's some kinda ink! In the meantime, our Dagwood-style sandwich is growing taller and more interesting. A banquet indeed!

When life gets in the way of your creating, loosen your belt buckle so you, too, can enjoy the banquet. And think ink! INK!

Please stay tuned for more!

Selamat makan! Happy filling and refilling!

E.L. Kongisburg's Silence

E.L. "Elaine" Konigsburg has passed. A true genius of a writer, witty, funny, smart, snarky--she was a thinker who created thoughtful, smart, young characters who made us think. I made a point of reading her books--all of them. Silence comes to mind when I think of her. She subscribed to the Japanese belief that creative blooms in negative space. That first we must empty ourselves, empty our minds, clear a space and let it rest, still and silent, trusting that new ideas will emerge in the same way spring buds in my Aunt Ingrid's garden (these are her pics).  E.L. Konigsburg's speech stayed with me, just as the characters she created have. I've referred to her often, as in this posting: Nothing is Something.  Here's the link: http://www.kellybennett.com/blog/2009/12/nothing-is-something/

Here's from NPR:"E.L. Konigsburg, the author of the 1967 children's book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two children who run away from home to live secretly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, . She was 83. Konigsburg won two Newbery Medals, and actresses Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall both played Mrs. Frankweiler — Bergman in a called The Hideaways, and Bacall in a TV movie. The book famously begins: 'Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.'"-http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/04/22/178338252/book-news-childrens-author-e-l-konigsburg-dies

Rodeo Time!

There I was, craving a little happy, when niece Claire shouted out: "A rodeo broke out during nap time."

"We heard noises coming from her room. It turns out she was saying "Yee-Haw!"

Speaking of Happies--Cowboys & Aliens & the catchy refrain: "Yippee-ki-yi! Yippee-ki-yo! I think I see a UFO!"  make Kathy Duval's newest picture book, illustrated by Alan McCauley, a sure-fire fun-fest! Kathy's guest starting on Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations this week. Check it out! And sign up for the Spectacular GIVE-AWAY!  Here's the link: http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/2013/04/guest-post-giveaway-kathy-duval-on.html

YEE HAW, ALL Y'ALL!!!!

Cooking Up Awareness

Have you noticed airport cultural diversity campaigns? Those corridors lined with posters show the same image with different definitions or different images with the same definition?

It makes the walk down gangways more interesting, definitely. And the message is delivered, clearly. But it’s nowhere near as effective as say, cooking a batch of barley.

It’s a happy little cook-a-thon afternoon. The music is playing, pots are bubbling and I’m dicing and slicing. Caught up in the joy of it all, I decided to cook up a batch of pearl barley. Those grains are just so darn good for you… The bag had been calling from the cupboard for a while.

While living in Indonesia, we always kept our grain products, pasta, flours, spices, grains, seeds, nuts… in the freezer to keep them from becoming bug food. We did the same when I was a kid in Huntington Beach—after big brother Joe and I whipped up and ate a batch of whole-wheat flour chocolate chip and weevil cookies.

In Trinidad, no one has warned us about bug issues with food storage. Sure it’s humid and hot and tropical—but it’s air-conditioned, a veritable fridge. So I didn’t think we had to freeze any of that stuff. Instead, I’ve been stuffing our freezer with important things: frozen margaritas, the corksicle, protein & chocolate bars!

Barley just takes so darn long to cook: 40 to 50 minutes. Caught up in cook-a-thon mania I’d decided to rescue the bag of pearl barley from the cupboard. Once I’d committed myself to putting in the time, I decided to do it right. Why mess around with cooking a few portions of barley when in the same amount of time I could cook a batch—all 50 some portions. (Where is that Food for 50 Cookbook anyway, John???)  Once it was cooled, I planned to season some up for eating today, then bag it, tag it, and pop the rest into the freezer to use in quick meals ahead. Rachael & Martha got nothing on me!

So, I dumped the whole box of pearl barley into a colander, gave it a good rinsing, clicked onto the Internet to find out the proper proportions of barley to water and cooking time, and got to it. Now if barley is good, wouldn’t barley with protein be better? That’s what I figured, too. So I added a couple more cups of water to the pot, set the timer for 20 minutes and measured out a cup of quinoa to add during the last half of the barley cooking time.

Fifty minutes later, I dipped out a spoonful for tasting. Blew on it. Chewed and called it done-and delish! I spooned it into a shallow 9x12 dish so it would cool faster and not cook more—no self-respecting cook wants over-cooked barley-quinoa blend—and went on about my way.

What the heck is quinoa—pronounced keen-wha! as in “how cool is this”—anyway? How come I had never heard of it until recently? It’s like those mysterious fish species that suddenly show up and fall off restaurant menus. Where have all the orange roughy gone?/Long time passing/How did all the tilapia and monk fish come?/Not long ago-oooooo/Oh will I ever learn?/O will I ev-ver learn… I’d never actually, for sure, definitively, held a quinoa, let alone cooked one before. Yes! of course, I’d eaten them (it?)… But always mixed in something else, usually a medley of grains, herbs and chopped veggies. So how was I to know what it (they?) would look like cooked?

Curtis moseyed into the kitchen around hungry time. While he was making his sandwich, he gave the dish of barley-quinoa, fiber & protein-enriched goodness a few stirs (and maybe a taste test or two) . . . it was after that that I took a good—then better—look.

Maybe when it (they?) cook, quinoa balls split apart and turn into little squiggles that look like half parenthesis or fingernail clippings? And maybe not . . .

Maybe quinoa stays in perfect tiny protein packed ball-shapes. And what, upon closer inspection, looked like baby pearl barley were (was?) quinoa. In that case . . .

What were those cute little half-parenthesis or fingernail clipping looking squiggles? They definitely look like worms. And didn’t one or two of them wiggle? (Which, if they did means they can withstand boiling then simmering for 50 minutes and survivalists ought to collect them for analysis.)

Had I, unknowingly, prepared a super, doubly-protein packed blend? One I might be able to sell to Atkins aficionados? Or, with a little effort, identify the optimal barley worm cultivating environment much the same way the Asmat of Papua have learned to cultivate sego palm worms. The WHO would surely award me some kind of metal for my efforts, wouldn’t they? (Not the musicians; the organization...although I wouldn’t mind meeting Roger-Baby.)

If this had been one of those power outage times when we operate by candlelight… or if I were in an unplug and tune in: let’s eat on the patio beneath the moon moods…or if we were in Papua or Pipette or some such exotic-sounding protein-deficient locale, that batch of super protein packed barley-worm-quinoa blend might well have been dressed, served and joyfully consumed.

But it wasn’t, I’m not, and we don’t—not that there’s anything wrong with it.

Need a Protein Boost?-Look Closer . . .

SO FAR AND YET SO CLOSE . . .

** I can’t just push on with my usual day and let my guests fend for themselves, can I? Especially not in Trinidad where they can’t drive, the only place close enough to walk to is the mall—or around in a circle, and if they leave the building without a “fob” (of which there are only 2) they’ll be locked out forever and have to sleep under a car and catch a long green lawn lizard for lunch . . . What sort of host would that brand me?

Recently . . . okay, last October, sis-in-law Marilyn came to visit. I placed the TT Travel Guide on her bedside table, handed her a pad of sticky-notes and told her we could go anywhere in the book she wanted. (Being new to Trinidad myself, I’d never been anywhere in the book, either, so it would be an adventure for both of us.)

Yes, I did warn Marilyn that I’d already suffered 2 flat tires, run out of gas and driven on the wrong side of the street more than once, as well as the wrong way down a one-way. . .  Eternally “yar,” Marilyn rose to the challenge.

Our first few outings were timid enough: jaunts around town; up up up a scenic hill; over and around the mountains to the beach…on a narrow, shoulderless pitted roads . . . during a rainstorm. . . .

On the day of our last outing, Marilyn flipped to a sticky note which directed us South on the highway to a Hindu Temple, “Waterloo Temple in the Sea.” At high tide it’s surrounded by water; at low tide by mud flats. It serves as testament to Sewdas Sadhu, who built it, “single-handedly”--spell check doesn't like this word apparently, it suggested: highhandedly, underhandedly, offhandedly, evenhandedly--over a 25 year period, by carrying stones on his bicycles and preparing and dumping bucket after bucket of concrete on the seafloor at low tide to build the foundation.

According to the book, the way to the temple seemed fairly straight forward---it was NOT!  Others might have been tempted to turn back. Not us! If Sadhu could do what he did, we could, with air-conditioned confidence, find it!

Good thing we passed a “doubles” vendor on the side of the road, and hostess mindedness—and tummy growls—compelled me to crank a U-turn so Marilyn could try one of these fist-sized gloppy curried chick peas-drizzled-with-chutney-cucumber-and-pepper sauce (if desired)-sandwiched in fry bread morsels or we might still be looking . . .

It was low tide and the scene around the temple island was mudflat and religious relics mired in muck. Not the most photogenic, but inspiring none-the-less as they reminded Marilyn of something more she’d read in the guide book—the Chaguananas Pottery makers, where red clay is fashioned into all manner of pottery and fired in open wood-fueled kilns.

Although Southeast Asia is far from Trinidad—on the other side of the world--our visit to  Benny’s Pottery Works, “the oldest and most famous” of the traditional pottery workshops transported me right back to Java or India or Nepal. . . The methods are the same. The workers possess the same wiry builds, same stance with cigarettes dangling from their mouth, same quickness and expertise.

So far and yet  close . . .

*I’ll only say this one time, never again, and only way down here at the bottom of the post. So if you’ve read this far, this is to you: Forgive me for slacking on the blogging. Truth is I've been so busy "filling my writer's well" (as my friend Richard Harnett puts it) I haven't taken time to blog. Stick with me, I'll be better about it, promise???

Be Mindful What You Wish. . .

Adages are busting out all over. To quite Phoebe Figalilly’s theme song, “so many splendid things keep happening!” Most significantly, my children, Max and Lexi are growing—have grown—into adults! Max married Michelle this past September; Lexi is engaged to Ryan, preparations are underway for their wedding this November; and Max and Michelle recently announced that they have a baby on the way. I’m going to be a GRANDMOTHER!

Aging aside, any/all of these wondrous events are enough to keep one awake at night…hence this post which comes as part Announcement, part Revelation and part Cautionary Tale:

I’m in New York at my first ever SCBWI Mid-Winter Conference where it is all about writing and books. In yesterday’s roundtable session, I brought a picture book manuscripts I’ve been obsessing over for about a year now to be workshopped. It’s about an excited sibling awaiting the birth of a new baby in the family. Afterwards, the writer seated beside me asked about my books: “Have you written anything I’d know?” A question that is flattering. . . and humbling. “I’d know” translates as “a book that’s sold a zillion copies or won a major award.”  I was floundering wondering how to answer when my eyes fell on her baby bump. First I thought: “So that’s why you liked my story. . . “ Then an Ah hah!: If you haven’t read them, you should—and buy them, too, because you and your mother are my intended audience:

As this morning was dawning, it dawned on me that each of these joyful, life changing family events I’m enjoying now came after a “brilliant, inspired, must-write-it-right-now” story idea struck. I’m not talking about a little “oh this will be fun” idea, either. I’m talking capital letters kind of IDEA that pulls me to my chair and holds me there captive, obsessed and loving the process. Which lead me to pose the oft posed question: Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

Stories—even picture books—take a long time. The manuscripts for Your Mommy was Just Like You and Your Daddy was Just Like You,  had to be written and revised, and then sent to my agent, and then sold to the amazing Susan Kochan, my GP Putnams' Sons editor, and then sent to David Walker who created the art, and then published—years! Back when the notion of Max being a “grown up” was just wishful thinking. As for this “little” story I had workshop, I’ve been tinkering with it for over a year, long before Max and Michelle tied the knot. It’s as though, on some cosmic level, my story IDEAS portend the future—cue Twilight Zone theme.

Which led me back to another book, one I read and worked through with the GGs, my creativity group, The Passion Test, by Janet and Chris Attwood, a guide to finding and achieving your goals based on the “Laws of Attraction.”

As anyone who knows me knows, I have song snippets in my head and these snippets, while often a source of irritation as they loop---day and night, night and day—these lyrics often also, and perhaps cosmically, point me toward the point of my ramblings. Oddly this morning, instead of song, (which is especially strange on this of all days as last night I went to bed with my noggin humming with Gershwin classics as Lexi and I had gone to Nice Work if You Can Get It with Mathew Broderick (a camp, delightful 20's style musical that have everyone in the theater smiling and humming along)  a joke came to mind:

A love-smitten little boy and girl are sitting side-by-side on the steps. With cartoon hearts swirl around his head, the boy grabs the girl. “I get what I want when I get it!” he demands, repeating words he’d heard a TV hero say. Evading his puckered lips, the little girl pulls free, telling him: “You’ll get what I got when I get it!”

Okay, maybe there’s nothing to all of this. Maybe it is just me trying to make sense of my largess and rapidly changing status (I don’t feel old enough to command the title “mother-in-law” much less “granny”). Be this as it may, it seems an excellent time to play it safe and revise another adage:

Be careful (make that mindful) what you wish [or write], you just might get it!

Lamest Excuse Ever

I would be working right now but . . . i broke my favorite earrings last night. i got up, set up my computer all ready to work. i was making coffee and had this excellent time-saving idea: indstead of wasting all this time waiting for the water to boil,fix your earrings. it was such an easy fix: just a tiny dab of glue, fit the post back into the whole....DONE.

I WAS WATCHING THE GLUE FLOW TOWARD THE APPLICATOR TIP....next thing i knew, it gushed out onto my fingers holding the post. i saw it happening. AFRAID THE GLUE WOULD GET ALL OVER EVERYTHING, I CAPPED IT FIRST....

HUGE MISTAKE!!!!!

now 2 fingers are stuck to the earring and two others are stuck together.

Directions on back of the bottle read: "soak in acetone nail polish remover then roll skin apart..." I AM SOAKING...

IF I EVER BEFORE DOUBTED THE POWER OF kyazy glue...

i am soaking, gritting my teeth against the pain as i try to pull/roll my fingers apart and typing this.

Palm skyward ala SCARLET O: With you as my witness, if i ever get free, i will never procrastinate or use KRAZY GLUE again!!!

**This posting was brought to you by an impaired in-pain inpatient wrong-handed typist.

Warning: VAMPIRE BABY is coming . . .

Tootie has fangs! And she knows how to use them...

It happens overnight: little sister Tootie goes from cuddly, ga-ga-googoo, I-want-my-ba-ba baby to . . .vampire baby. Now she’s sinking her pointy fangs into everything -- furniture, toys, and especially her big brother ("Youch, Tootie! No bite!"). Mom insists that it’s just a phase, but Tootie’s brother knows better. Just look at her hairline! Or the fact that all her favorite foods are red, blood red! . . .

VAMPIRE BABY is fanged, dangerous, and crawling your way this July.